No firm numbers on how many flights were affected by the problem in Memphis today, but it sounds like the after-effects are still being felt from one side of the country to another.

From a reader — an American Airlines’ pilot:

“Yea we were just north of PHL when we got our reroute.  EWR to DFW via AEX (Alexandra, LA).  We came down through ZDC, ZTL and ZHU airspace which tacked on about 20 minutes to the total time.  Other then the additional flight time the controllers work load didn’t seem any greater.

About thirty airplanes on the east side of DFW on the ground stop at 3:00 pm but I didn’t see what the west side looked like.”

So what caused the ATC outage in Memphis in the first place?

Several reports say the problem was caused by a cut in the main fiber optic cable leading into the center.

Which begs the question….is the cable going to the ATC operations not important enough to make sure this does not happen?

Or as one person said on another airline-related message board, why wasn’t the fiber run in a SONET ring. What is a SONET ring?

According to this cable person, “It is a self-healing fiber optic ring that has the ability to send the same data in 2 directions. If the fiber gets cut somewhere, the light passing through it is instantaneously redirected around the other side of the ring and no one (customer wise) knows that there is a problem. The damaged fiber is repaired and the ring is ready to take another hit.”